Flexible Reality
Friday, December 12, 2003
From Forrest Gump, the Movie:
Lt. Dan: "Have you found Jesus yet Gump?"
Forrest Gump: "I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for him - Sir."
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FG: "Stupid is as stupid does."
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FG: "That's all I have to say about that."
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No Really, That's All I Have to Say About That !!
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Doubts Linger About SCO's Cyber-Attack Claims
Internetweek.com Article
By Mitch Wagner
While Linux users have retracted accusations that SCO made up its claims to have been victim of a distributed denial-of-service attacks, doubts about SCO's claims linger.
In the face of third party evidence that the attacks did happen, Linux users retracted accusations that SCO was lying. But Linux and security experts stood by their statements that SCO's description of the attacks make no sense, and that competent network administrators can easily protect themselves against the type of attack SCO says happened to it.
In a statement issued Wednesday, the company said it was experiencing a distributed denial-of-service attack that caused its "Web site (www.sco.com) and corporate operational traffic to be unavailable during the morning hours including e-mail, the company intranet, and customer support operations."
SCO said on Friday that the attacks had ended. The company claims it was targeted by a type of attack known as a SYN attack, where external servers begin to initiate a connection with a target server, and then refuse to release that connection. Linux advocates -- led by the weblog Groklaw.net in a post made on Wednesday and Slashdot.org in a Thursday post -- were quick to dismiss SCO's claims, saying that the attacks did not appear to be happening at all, and that the evidence presented by SCO did not resemble evidence of SYN attacks. Linux advocates said SCO might therefore be lying about the attacks in an effort to discredit the open source community.
Linux advocates claims that the attacks didn't happen were undercut by a report from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), which issued a report Dec. 11 confirming that the attacks occurred. CAIDA said the University of California San Diego Network Telescope, which monitors distributed denial of service attacks worldwide, detected evidence of the DDOS aginst SCO.
Groklaw posted a message on Friday afternoon retracting the accusation that SCO is lying, but stood by its assertions that SCO's network outage demonstrates the company has incompetent security. Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, agreed that SCO does not appear to have been under a SYN attack. "SCO's self-diagnosis makes no sense," he said. "But that doesn't mean SCO is lying."
He added, "We have no idea. We'll never know. Clearly, it's not a SYN flood, they're wrong about that. The question is, are they lying, or is a clever hacker doing something to them that looks to a nave observer like a SYN flood?" He continued, "It could be a politically motivated attack. There could be a smart, politically motivated hacker doing it. SCO is a company people love to hate, like Microsoft and the furriers."
We asked several Linux and security experts to look over Groklaw's analysis of the attacks. These included: contributing editor Don MacVittie, who is currently an IT project manager for a major midwestern utility company, and has an extensive Linux and IT background; Neil Schneider, president of the Kernel-Panic Linux User Group; and Matt Brown, CEO of LAMP Host, a Linux-based Internet hosting company. While they did not have firsthand knowledge of the SCO situation, they agreed that Groklaw's analysis of the situation is credible and knowledgeable.
Groklaw raised questions about SCO's claims that its intranet was brought down by the attack. Why was the intranet exposed to the public Internet, Groklaw asked. But SCO claims that, while the SYN attacks themselves were thwarted, the volume of the attacks flooded bandwidth to SCO's servers on the public Internet, making them inaccessible.
Jeff Carlon, director of worldwide IT infrastructure for SCO, said that the intranet was only partially hit by the attack. Intranet networks at individual SCO locations were unaffected by the attack, but connections between locations -- which are carried over the public Internet -- were down for about two hours, Carlon said.
"Our intranet here at this particularly location was available the whole time," Carlon said. "But our intranet also expands outward from a global perspective, and like many companies we rely on the Internet to provide that bandwidth. There was only a short period of about two hours when our intranet was unavailable, and that was because the bandwidth was overloaded."
SCO's critics said that defenses against SYN attacks have existed for a long time, and SCO is therefore incompetent. But Carlon said SCO has those protections in place; that SCO was victimized by the sheer flood of attacks overwhelming the company's bandwidth.
Carlon said that speculation on what kind of attack SCO suffered misses the point that SCO was the victim.
"We have spent a lot of time talking about what kind of attack we had, what we could have done, what we should have done," he said. "The thing we have to keep in mind is we are just like any other company out there trying to run a business. Just because someone doesn't agree with our business direction really doesn't give them the right to engage in criminal activities against our company."
SCO's Internet servers run on a third-party hosting company which -- ironically enough -- uses Linux. SCO claims that it owns the copyright to Linux, and that users who fail to purchase licenses from SCO are violating SCO's intellectual property. Carlon said SCO has not investigated whether its web hosting company has a clean Linux license.
"We have not had discussions with them regarding the license. They have not requested a license, nor have we really gone after them from a licensing perspective," Carlon said.
Want or need some help with Google Search modifier parameters?
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Deliberate Debacle
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times
Published: December 12, 2003
James Baker sets off to negotiate Iraqi debt forgiveness with our estranged allies. And at that very moment the deputy secretary of defense releases a "Determination and Findings" on reconstruction contracts that not only excludes those allies from bidding, but does so with highly offensive language. What's going on? Maybe I'm giving Paul Wolfowitz too much credit, but I don't think this was mere incompetence. I think the administration's hard-liners are deliberately sabotaging reconciliation.
Surely this wasn't just about reserving contracts for administration cronies. Yes, Halliburton is profiteering in Iraq — will apologists finally concede the point, now that a Pentagon audit finds overcharging? And reports suggest a scandal in Bechtel's vaunted school-repair program. But I've always found claims that profiteering was the motive for the Iraq war — as opposed to a fringe benefit — as implausible as claims that the war was about fighting terrorism. There are deeper motives here.
Mr. Wolfowitz's official rationale for the contract policy is astonishingly cynical: "Limiting competition for prime contracts will encourage the expansion of international cooperation in Iraq and in future efforts" — future efforts? — and "should encourage the continued cooperation of coalition members." Translation: we can bribe other nations to send troops.
But I doubt whether even Mr. Wolfowitz believes that. The last year, from the failure to get U.N. approval for the war to the retreat over the steel tariff, has been one long lesson in the limits of U.S. economic leverage. Mr. Wolfowitz knows as well as the rest of us that allies who could really provide useful help won't be swayed by a few lucrative contracts.
If the contracts don't provide useful leverage, however, why torpedo a potential reconciliation between America and its allies? Perhaps because Mr. Wolfowitz's faction doesn't want such a reconciliation.
These are tough times for the architects of the "Bush doctrine" of unilateralism and preventive war. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their fellow Project for a New American Century alumni viewed Iraq as a pilot project, one that would validate their views and clear the way for further regime changes. (Hence Mr. Wolfowitz's line about "future efforts.")
Instead, the venture has turned sour — and many insiders see Mr. Baker's mission as part of an effort by veterans of the first Bush administration to extricate George W. Bush from the hard-liners' clutches. If the mission collapses amid acrimony over contracts, that's a good thing from the hard-liners' point of view.
Bear in mind that there is plenty of evidence of policy freebooting by administration hawks, such as the clandestine meetings last summer between Pentagon officials working for Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy and planning — and a key player in the misrepresentation of the Iraqi threat — and Iranians of dubious repute. Remember also that blowups by the hard-liners, just when the conciliators seem to be getting somewhere, have been a pattern.
There was a striking example in August. It seemed that Colin Powell had finally convinced President Bush that if we aren't planning a war with North Korea, it makes sense to negotiate. But then John Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control, whose role is more accurately described as "the neocons' man at State," gave a speech about Kim Jong Il, declaring: "To give in to his extortionist demands would only encourage him and, perhaps more ominously, other would-be tyrants."
In short, this week's diplomatic debacle probably reflects an internal power struggle, with hawks using the contracts issue as a way to prevent Republican grown-ups from regaining control of U.S. foreign policy. And initial indications are that the ploy is working — that the hawks have, once again, managed to tap into Mr. Bush's fondness for moralistic, good-versus-evil formulations. "It's very simple," Mr. Bush said yesterday. "Our people risk their lives. . . . Friendly coalition folks risk their lives. . . . The contracting is going to reflect that."
In the end the Bush doctrine — based on delusions of grandeur about America's ability to dominate the world through force — will collapse. What we've just learned is how hard and dirty the doctrine's proponents will fight against the inevitable.
Pentagon: Halliburton Overcharged Millions
Pentagon Probe Finds Halliburton Overcharged As Much As $61 Million for Gasoline in Iraq
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON Dec. 11 — Pentagon auditors found that Vice President Dick Cheney's former company overcharged by possibly as much as $61 million for gasoline in Iraq, senior defense officials said Thursday. Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, also submitted a proposal for cafeteria services that was $67 million too high, the officials said speaking on the condition of anonymity. The officials said the Pentagon rejected that proposal.
The Pentagon officials said they were concerned about the problems with KBR's contracts, which were awarded without competitive bidding for up to $15.6 billion. "Contractor improprieties and/or contract mischarging on department contracts will neither be condoned nor allowed to continue," Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's budget chief, said Thursday. Defense officials said the Pentagon was negotiating with KBR over how to resolve the fuel overcharging issue.
A Good News - Bad News View: Good: They got caught at it; Bad: That it happened is only of interest to the opposition.
A Baghdad Thanksgiving's Lingering Aftertaste
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
Friday, December 12, 2003; Page A35
It's been two weeks since Bush made that secret trip to Iraq, but the flight itself continues to cause turbulence.
The controversy began when the White House said Air Force One was spotted by a British Airways plane but the president's pilots told the dubious British Airways pilots by radio that they were flying a Gulfstream V. The White House later said there was no British Airways plane involved and the conversation took place between British air traffic control and another plane while Air Force One was "off the western coast of England."
As it happens, Air Force One was flying across the North Sea, off the eastern coast of England, when it was spotted by the mystery plane, a German charter jet. But that's being picky.
Of more concern, air traffic controllers in Britain are seething over the flight, in which the president's 747, falsely identified as a Gulfstream, traveled through British airspace. Prospect, the controllers union in the United Kingdom, says the flight broke international regulations, posed a potential safety threat and exposed a weakness in the air defense system that could be exploited by terrorists.
"The overriding concern is if the president's men who did this can dupe air traffic control, what's to stop a highly organized terrorist group from duping air traffic control?" asked David Luxton, Prospect's national secretary. Luxton said the flight was in "breach" of regulations against filing false flight plans set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, which he said should apply to a military aircraft using civilian airspace.
Luxton said that by identifying itself as a Gulfstream V instead of the much larger 747, Air Force One could have put itself and other airplanes in danger. The Gulfstream can climb faster and maneuver more nimbly than a 747, which means controllers could have assumed the president's plane was capable of a collision-avoiding maneuver that it couldn't actually do. And the "wake vortex" of a 747, much larger than a Gulfstream's, could jeopardize smaller planes that were told by unsuspecting controllers to follow in the mislabeled plane's wake.
As it happens, Air Force One passed without incident. But Luxton said that's beside the point. "It's important air traffic control have an accurate picture of what's up there in the sky they're controlling," he said. The White House has declined to elaborate further on the flight plan and other security measures for the trip.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Musicians Urge Board to Keep Maazel
By ROBIN POGREBIN
NY Times
Published: December 10, 2003
After months of speculation about whether the New York Philharmonic would replace Lorin Maazel as its music director or extend his contract, the orchestra's board has begun to confront the question, and the musicians are rallying around him.
At a Philharmonic board meeting last week, several musicians, invited to speak, testified to how much they enjoyed working with Mr. Maazel. The musicians have determined that there are no clear candidates who would justify an end to Mr. Maazel's tenure. His four-year contract expires in 2006. "If we have no one to replace Maazel, we just can't let him go," Glenn Dicterow, the orchestra's concertmaster, said yesterday. "I just don't think we're in a rush to replace someone as brilliant as Mr. Maazel."
When he was selected in 2001, Mr. Maazel was assumed to be a one-term appointment. He was 70, and concerns about an aging audience prompted calls for a less traditional leader. But his appointment also represented the new power of the orchestra's musicians, who had pushed for Mr. Maazel, having played under him as a visiting conductor. Many orchestra members continue to say they are content under his baton
No harassment probe after all
In reversal, California Governor says he won't look into groping charges.
By Laura Mecoy and Mareva Brown -- Sacramento Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday said he has decided against initiating an investigation into sexual harassment allegations against him, despite promising to do so before the Oct. 7 recall election. His administration made the announcement as a stunt woman who alleged Schwarzenegger harassed her on two movie sets filed a libel suit against him. In the lawsuit, Rhonda Miller charges that his campaign staff falsely suggested she was a convicted prostitute.
Monday, December 08, 2003
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Revised December 3, 2003
Congressional Leadership pushes for extending expiring tax breaks, but ignores expiring unemployment benefits. The House of Representatives extends large corporate tax break first enacted in 2002 stimulus package, while Majority Leader says economic conditions mean unemployment extension is unnecessary
Abercrombie & Fitch's Blue Christmas
The dirty little secret behind the racy catalog: lousy sales.
By Daniel Gross in Slate
Posted Monday, Dec. 8, 2003, at 11:53 AM PT
The 2003 Christmas shopping season may be only a few weeks old, but it's already pretty clear who the big loser is: Abercrombie & Fitch. In November, in the face of a boycott led by the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, the company recalled its racy catalog, the A&F Quarterly, which bears more resemblance to Playboy than to the Wilson Quarterly.
The "Christmas Field Guide" featured cover language promising "group sex and more" and photos of wholesome-looking youths in not very wholesome poses. On Sunday night, 60 Minutes charged that Abercrombie is the apparel industry's version of Hooters, hiring hotties to work on the sales floor and relegating less bodacious associates to the stock room. The company also faces a class-action lawsuit filed by former Clinton Justice Department civil rights hand Bill Lann Lee, which claims the all-American retailer discriminates against nonwhite job applicants.
The problem is that the teen audience, raised in a climate of highly accessible pornography and lewdness, requires an ever-higher level of raunchiness to be shocked into consumption. A&F's catalogs have been banking on illicit activities for years. In 1998, the Center for Science in the Public Interest slammed the back-to-school catalog's "Drinking 101" promotion. Here are some fun facts about the 2002 magalog. And this summer's back-to-school catalog was dubbed "The SEX ED Issue."
But people in the business of selling sex to teens face a law of diminishing returns. For Britney Spears, simply gyrating and groaning used to be enough to send teens into paroxysms of consumption. With each passing year, however, she's been forced to raise (or lower) the bar. And even though she audaciously sucked face with twice-her-age Madonna on national television, Britney has seen her album sales slide.
Every year Abercrombie & Fitch goes to greater lengths to appeal to teens' prurient interests, too, hoping hormones will translate into sales. It's not working. It may be that the firm has signally failed to understand its customer, which is the most fundamental rule of retailing. The catalogs titillate teens, but they're increasingly angering their parents. While 16-year-olds may be able to go to the mall by themselves, most still rely on their parents to pay for the clothes they buy.
Sunday, December 07, 2003
Over the Top???
Hack the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times
Published: December 2, 2003
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell — who says that he wasn't talking about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail.
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems. "How do you know?" he asks.
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.
Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software — which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary — on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.") The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so.
An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily redacted version.)
Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination.
Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or business story — not as a potential political scandal.
This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues, like the Florida "felon purge" that inappropriately prevented many citizens from voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude seems to be that questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive at best, paranoid at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr. Holt make a point of dissociating themselves from "conspiracy theories." Instead, they focus on legislation to prevent future abuses.
But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political operatives, given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently announced that one of his aides had improperly accessed sensitive Democratic computer files that were leaked to the press.
This admission — contradicting an earlier declaration by Senator Hatch that his staff had been cleared of culpability — came on the same day that the Senate police announced that they were hiring a counterespionage expert to investigate the theft. Republican members of the committee have demanded that the expert investigate only how those specific documents were leaked, not whether any other breaches took place. I wonder why.
The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to temptation?
I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake.
You say you never read Updike's "Uprising at the A&P"? Read it once and you will never forget it.
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A&P
by john updike
In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out o fthose white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri ce-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks- rackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.
You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.
"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."
"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.
"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it.
Now here comes the sad part of the story, at:least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49�. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."
Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on.
"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it hadjust occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.
Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back -- a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing."
"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you come in here."
"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?"
I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
"Did you say something, Sammy?"
"I said I quit."
"I thought you did."
"You didn't have to embarrass them."
"It was they who were embarrassing us."
I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand- mother's, and I know she would have been pleased.
"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said.
"I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'djust had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.
As a fan of John Updike's writing from the early days of "The A&P Uprising" it is with great expectation for future pleasures that I hope to one day obtain a copy of his "Early Stories", all 800+ pages of literary masterpieces. In a review in Slate's Online Mag, Sam Tanenhaus gives a fitting retro look at one of the Titan's of American Fiction.
Job One For Kerry: Rebound In N.H.
Dean Far Ahead in Former Stronghold
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2003; Page A01
MANCHESTER, N.H., Dec. 4 -- If John F. Kerry was looking for a sign that he has turned around his struggling presidential campaign, he got the opposite in New Hampshire on Thursday. Two new polls charted the erosion of his support in a state where the Massachusetts senator was once the heavy favorite.
The World Trade Center Memorial Competition Finalists, and the winner appears to be "Passages of Light". See it here.
December 7, 2003
Who Wins and Who Loses as Jobs Move Overseas?
NY Times
By ERIKA KINETZ
The outsourcing of jobs to China and India is not new, but lately it has earned a chilling new adjective: professional. Advances in communications technology have enabled white-collar jobs to be shipped from the United States and Europe as never before, and the outcry from workers who once considered themselves invulnerable is creating a potent political force.
After falling by 2.8 million jobs since early 2001, employment has risen by 240,000 jobs since August. That gain, less than some expected, has not resolved whether the nation is suffering cyclical losses or permanent job destruction.
Last month, The International Herald Tribune convened a roundtable at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan to discuss how job migration is changing the landscape.
The participants were Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington that receives a third of its financing from labor unions; Diana Farrell, the director of the McKinsey Global Institute, which is McKinsey & Company's internal economics research group; Edmund Harriss, the portfolio manager of the Guinness Atkinson China and Hong Kong fund and the Guinness Atkinson Asia Focus fund; M. Eric Johnson, director of Tuck's Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College; and, via conference call from Singapore, Stephen S. Roach, managing director and chief economist of Morgan Stanley . Following are excerpts from their conversation.
Q. How big an issue is job migration?
MR. ROACH Offshore outsourcing is a huge deal. We do not have a data series called jobs lost to offshore outsourcing, but 23 months into the recovery, private sector jobs are running nearly seven million workers below the norm of the typical hiring cycle. Something new is going on. America is short of jobs as never before, and the major candidates for our offshore outsourcing are ramping up employment as never before. So yes, I think two and two is four.
MS. FARRELL This is a big deal in the sense that we see something structural happening. But I would react to the notion that it is a big deal we should try to stop or recognize as anything other than the economic process of change. I think the bigger deal is the fact that we are going to have very serious curtailment of the working age population.
MR. BIVENS I'm curious about Steve's assertion that outsourcing can explain the sluggish employment situation. If you just look at slow growth plus fast productivity, you've got the sluggish labor market right there.
MR. ROACH A pickup in productivity does not have to be accompanied by sluggish employment. There are countless examples, like the 1960's and again the 1990's, of rapid productivity growth accompanied by rapid employment.
The point is that the relationship between aggregate demand and employment growth looks to me as if it has broken down. That breakdown reflects not just the rapid growth and maturation of outsourcing platforms in places like China and India, but also the accelerated pace by which these platforms can now be connected to the developed world through the Internet. These are brand-new developments. This is a huge challenge for service-based economies, like the United States.
MR. BIVENS How much of the insecurity that people think is caused by service sector outsourcing is in fact just the business cycle as usual? Every time there's a recession people want to blame it on some underlying structural factor, when sometimes recessions are just recessions, shortfalls in demand that work themselves out.
MR. ROACH Over the September to November period, employment has turned up, but many of those jobs came from the temporary hiring industry. These are service jobs, contingent workers without benefits and significantly lower pay scales. We're getting the G.D.P. growth, and by now any recovery in the past would be flashing green on the hiring front. This one isn't. With all due respect, I don't know what you guys are talking about. This is a profoundly different relationship between hiring and the business cycle. And I think these jobs are, by in large, lost forever.
Q. Who wins in offshoring and who loses?
MS. FARRELL There is an assumption by protectionists that these jobs are going somewhere else, and all this money has been pocketed by C.E.O.'s who take it home. A little more sophisticated version is: It's being pocketed by companies in the form of profits. One step further and you say those profits are either going to go as returns to the investors in those companies, or they're going to go into new investment by those companies. Those savings enable me, if I am an investor, to consume more and therefore contribute to job recreation, and if I am a company, to re-invest and create jobs. That's important because I agree that we are migrating jobs away, some of which will never return, nor should they.
MR. BIVENS Within nations, trade tends to redistribute a lot of income. The gains get pretty concentrated in the pockets of capital owners. The people who lose out are the blue-collar workers. Now you've got this class of white-collar workers who are much more insecure about their job prospects, and their labor market bargaining power is being undermined. It doesn't mean we need walls all around the economy, but it does mean we need to get really serious about making sure all these gains are distributed.
MR. HARRISS Look at what's gone on in China over the last 10 years: There are 300 million people in those eastern coastal provinces who have seen an extraordinary pickup in their standard of living. And you're seeing an economy that is just about to take wing because you now have consumers who were never able to participate in the economy before. Now it is people in the developed world who are being left behind. That is very difficult to resolve.
Q. One key piece of the win-win theory seems to be that displaced workers do find new jobs. What does history teach us about how well displaced manufacturing workers have been reintegrated into the work force?
MR. BIVENS The best research on what happens to people displaced from manufacturing is that they eventually find a new job, but they take an average wage cut of 13 to 14 percent. The people who are hit hardest are older workers. Also, it's not just the worker who is directly displaced from a sector that is hurt by international trade, it is also every other worker in the economy who has a similar skills profile.
Q. For labor, is outsourcing a race to the bottom?
MR. ROACH It's a race to the bottom if we spend all our energy trying to protect existing sources of job creation, as the politicians in the U.S. Congress are inclined to do. The problem is that globalization is growing asymmetrically, so initially it creates more supply than demand. We're living through that asymmetry right now, and that has caused a potentially dangerous political backlash. The Chinese, for example, are reluctant to transform their habits from savers to consumers because they're losing jobs through the reform of their own economy, and they don't have social security or retirement. Over time there is a rising tide. But the political process is not that patient.
Q. If protectionism is the wrong answer, explain how the market will solve this. Does government need to intervene at all?
MR. ROACH This is classic election-year posturing by a Congress that is basically responsible for the problem itself and doesn't want to admit it. We have trade deficits with China and Japan because Washington is running the most reckless fiscal policy we've seen in the United States since the late 1960's. They are the problem. It's not the Chinas and Japans and Indias of the world. Moreover, there are a lot of assumptions being made, especially by political leaders, that the rapid growth of Chinese exports and production is the smoking gun of the threat to traditional sources of job creation. About two-thirds of the export growth China has realized over the last 10 years has come from Chinese subsidiaries of multinational corporations headquartered in Japan, the U.S. and Europe and their joint venture partners. These are our companies. It's us; it's not necessarily them.
MR. JOHNSON It's all about innovation and productivity. As long as we maintain those two engines, we'll continue to have a very high standard of living. Out in the Bay Area there are plenty of folks who would love to create a little bit of protectionism around their I.T. jobs, but we are far better off letting a lot of those jobs go. Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.
MS. FARRELL We will require different services, medical devices, all kinds of things to support an aging population. Fifteen years ago, you would not have been able to fathom many of the jobs that exist today.
MR. HARRISS There is not much new radical innovation in Asia of the kind we're looking at to create jobs in the U.S. Apart from a very few exceptions, what Asia does well is take the latest innovations and production techniques, invest in the most recent equipment and then bring in their powerful advantages in low-cost labor, and start to produce. For the most part, the benefits to Asia are just going to come with more people coming off the poverty line and into the global economy.
Q. What happens when China ceases to be an endless pit of poverty?
MR. ROACH China for all practical purposes has an infinite supply of labor: 400 million in its urban population and another 900 million in the rural area. The average wage of a Chinese worker is still 2.5 to 3 percent of the counterpart in the developed world. Those are disparities that will be around for a long time.
Q. Can China keep labor costs so low and still grow a critical mass of domestic consumers?
MS. FARRELL You are still talking about a pretty significant critical mass of people who are now entering consumption level incomes: $7,000 to $10,000 G.D.P. per capita. Car sales in China are growing at 26 to 30 percent compound annual growth rates. Televisions, refrigerators, mobile handsets all have the same kind of J-curve. You only need 10 percent of the population to have a critical mass of income.
Q. What do you see in the future?
MR. BIVENS Globalization is good at increasing the productive capacity of the world, but to make sure there are enough jobs for everybody, you need demand to keep pace with that increase in supply. That's where globalization presents a real challenge. Government's big roles in the future are to make sure global demand matches supply, and to provide social insurance schemes to make sure the living standards of the workers being left behind aren't sacrificed on the altar of global progress.
MR. ROACH In the future there are two roads. One is to look backward and hang on to what we think we're entitled to. The other is to recognize what has made America. Our virtues lie in a flexible and open, technology friendly, risk-taking, entrepreneurial, market-driven system. This is exactly the same type of challenge farmers went through in the late 1800's, sweatshop workers went through in the early 1900's, and manufacturing workers did in the first half of the 80's. We've got to focus on setting in motion a debate that pushes us into new sources of job creation rather than bemoaning the loss. There are Republicans and Democrats alike who are involved in this protectionist backlash. They're very vocal right now, and they need to be challenged.
